Posted on by Cameron Neylon

A great example of ‘fun’

I wrote the other day about the idea of fun being a motivating factor to taking up open notebook science. Sometimes something is just cool and you want to share it. Then along comes a great example.

Via petermr’s blog:

At ‘Life of a Lab Rat‘:

This has got to be in the running for the coolest cloning experiment ever.

Last Tuesday a grad student in the reciprocal space cadet lab, let’s call him Fu Manchu, asked me if I had any GFP. ‘GFP’ expands to ‘green fluorescent protein’……[]

As petermr says this is just very cool. The molecular biology is fairly conventional. But that’s not the point. The point is that Black Knight did a fun experiment and felt it was worth sharing with the world. We might argue that there isn’t enough methodological detail to tell us exactly what was done here but that’s a minor quibble. The important thing is that it was fun and its out there!

Incidentally, I am writing this in the lab while waiting for PCR primers to melt so I can set up some PCR reactions (here if you want to look – though you may not be able to access this at the moment, still need to get this one to public access). I am beginning to think that one of the main issues of open notebook science for biochemistry/molecular biology may be the difficulty in using a track pad with nitrile gloves on!

11 Replies to “A great example of ‘fun’”

  1. Heck, if you’re really interested in the methodological minutiae I can show you my lab book . . .

    Yes, as others have pointed out, it was nothing new but it was fun.

    bk

  2. Heck, if you’re really interested in the methodological minutiae I can show you my lab book . . .

    Yes, as others have pointed out, it was nothing new but it was fun.

    bk

  3. Black Knight, that’s exactly what we’re interested in at least on this blog. I guess you weren’t intending to treat the post as a ‘lab book’ but that’s the kind of thing we are working towards.

  4. Black Knight, that’s exactly what we’re interested in at least on this blog. I guess you weren’t intending to treat the post as a ‘lab book’ but that’s the kind of thing we are working towards.

  9. @Jean-Claude: We’re aiming to just make it publically available. One of the other blogs is freely available to read. That’s at: http://chemtools.chem.soton.ac.uk/projects/blog/blogs.php/blog_id/13

    Two things at the moment. Its not immediately ‘human readable’ and at the moment its not enabled for comments from the outside. I’ll try to make sure you get an account which should enable you to make comments.

    @Black Knight: I should say that I’m a pretty late comer to OpenWetWare and still haven’t got a lab site up yet. But the aim is to put my primary group web page there and link into some other resources that we’re setting up. e.g. we are keeping our plasmid database here;

    http://neylonlaboratory.dabbledb.com/publish/laboratorystocks

    but I haven’t got the full sequences up yet.

  10. @Jean-Claude: We’re aiming to just make it publically available. One of the other blogs is freely available to read. That’s at: http://chemtools.chem.soton.ac.uk/projects/blog/blogs.php/blog_id/13

    Two things at the moment. Its not immediately ‘human readable’ and at the moment its not enabled for comments from the outside. I’ll try to make sure you get an account which should enable you to make comments.

    @Black Knight: I should say that I’m a pretty late comer to OpenWetWare and still haven’t got a lab site up yet. But the aim is to put my primary group web page there and link into some other resources that we’re setting up. e.g. we are keeping our plasmid database here;

    http://neylonlaboratory.dabbledb.com/publish/laboratorystocks

    but I haven’t got the full sequences up yet.

  11. Pingback: Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - petermr’s blog » Blog Archive » When does open science work?

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